Anish Kapoor's Monumenta sculpture alludes to the idea of the cathedral: the
body as living, breathing sacred space. Mark Hudson is finally won over by
the artist. Rating: * * * * *

Anish Kapoor was always going to be an obvious choice for Monumenta, the indoor public art project that fills the vast belle époque exhibition hall of the Grand Palais with a single work for five weeks every spring.

Size matters in contemporary art. From vast outdoor public sculptures such as the Angel of the North and Mark Wallinger’s soon to be realised White Horse to the many projects designed to enliven Tate Modern’s vast, bare Turbine Hall, the scale of art just keeps getting bigger.

If last year’s Monumenta project, by the French artist Christian Boltanski – heaps of used clothes highlighting the plight of the dispossessed – didn’t come close to realising the possibilities of the space, in Kapoor the organisers have found an artist whose track record suggests he is more than man enough to fill the very largest art arena. Not only will his Mittal Tower, currently being built at the Olympic site, be one of London’s tallest structures, and his 2002 piece Marsyas was the only work to have done justice to Tate Modern’s enormous scale, but his work receives massive public endorsement wherever it appears. His 2009 Royal Academy show was apparently the most successful exhibition by a contemporary artist ever seen in London, while his ‘Cloud Gate’ in Chicago is claimed to be the world’s most popular work of art.

It’s hardly surprising then that the Indian-born British artist’s ‘Leviathan’ should generate a sense of awe before you’ve even passed through the Grand Palais’s exuberant faux-classical portals or have any idea of what is waiting on the other side.

Passing into a darkened entrance hall, you are ushered, not to say bundled, through a doorway into an immense, red womb-like space, lit through its membrane-like surface which looks soft, almost velvet-like, but is rubbery and barely yields to the touch. Gaping orifices open out into three more pod-like spaces. Far from standing in the exhibition hall looking at an object, you’re in the object itself, with no sense of the surrounding environment – until the sun comes out projecting the web-like patterns of the Grand Palais’s roof over the rounded surfaces.

Passing back out into the entrance area, you head through another door into the body of the hall where you’re hit by brilliant sunlight and overwhelmed by a gigantic globular rubber structure – the exterior of the space you’ve just been in – which appears about to roll over you.

The structure’s central space and three extensions appear as immense purple rubber spheres projecting into the three parts of the hall, cohering in a mass that seems to splurge through the building’s entrance, challenging the vaulted greenhouse-like roof and looping art nouveau balconies surrounding it, while projecting, in its perfect symmetry, an odd, futuristic elegance of its own.

Moving through the arches formed by the immense rounded rubber feet you feel truly tiny, the people on the far side of the hall appearing positively antlike. Yet far from feeling oppressive, this immense mass glows where the light hits it, reflecting the leaping arches overhead. Whichever way you look or move you’re hit by some extraordinary new vista. The juxtaposition of the two structures is exhilarating in its sheer unlikeliness: the Grand Palais, epitome of the self-consciously man-made, and Kapoor’s rubber mass, which for all its organic, bodily qualities is no less synthetic.

While Kapoor has stated that the work’s title. ‘Leviathan’, was inspired by the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s idea of the state as an unwieldy, inchoate monster, he has advised against over-literal interpretations. First and foremost the piece is a play of structure and scale that alludes to the idea of the cathedral: the body as living, breathing sacred space, inside a structure that is literally cathedral-like. If the scale is overwhelming and megalomanic, there’s a humour to the piece that feels very human. In the past I’ve never been entirely convinced by Kapoor’s work, feeling him to be more a planner of grandiose and rather soulless projects than an artist in the real sense, but in this instance he completely won me over.